Primary
Emil Cioran
The defining influence. Not the pessimism everyone talks about — the generosity. Cioran refuses to console you, which is the most honest thing a writer can do.
/// The long version
About
Introduction
ShiShi is a Brooklyn-based experimental electronic artist crafting dark, cinematic soundscapes at the crossroads of ambient, industrial, and trip-hop.
Influenced by Lorn, Arca, Aphex Twin, and Björk, ShiShi moves between minimal and dense, fragile and abrasive, exploring emotional depth beyond fixed forms. With a background in philosophy, sound becomes a space where logic and intuition meet — focused on atmosphere and texture, building immersive environments rather than traditional song structures.
experimental electronic artist • ambient × industrial × trip-hop • philosophy background • Brooklyn, NY • debut EP Blood Tape (2025) • currently: madness was sad
/// Chapter 01
Origin
The shortest version: I trained as a philosopher — undergraduate degree, master's, then doctoral research. Years inside the questions of perception, identity, consciousness, and the limits of human thought.
Before ShiShi I founded and ran @equality.media as editor-in-chief — a media project on a different set of questions, still about how we see each other and ourselves. That project taught me what I didn't yet know I was looking for: a medium where the philosophical weight could move at the speed of feeling, not argument.
In 2024 I started building tracks. By 2025 I had five of them that held together as a coherent body of work — that became Blood Tape. The press response told me something I'd been hoping might be true: that the philosophical training and the dark electronic instinct could feed each other instead of competing.
ShiShi is not a pseudonym I hide behind. It's the name of the project that finally fits the work. The same questions, in a different register — now built from atmosphere and texture rather than argument.
/// Chapter 02
Thinkers
Parallel
Albert Camus
The absurd not as bleakness but as a starting point. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" — the hardest line in 20th-century philosophy, because it asks you to hold contradiction without resolving it.
Methodological
Phenomenology / AI ethics
My doctoral work sits at the intersection of phenomenology and ethics of artificial intelligence — questions about perception, identity, and the limits of thought when the thinker is no longer presumed to be human.
Aesthetic
Andrei Tarkovsky
"In cinema, time must flow independently and with dignity." Change "cinema" to "track" and you have the only production rule that never leaves me.
/// Chapter 03
The room
The studio is one room. The room is not special. The room becomes the place where the work happens only because the work happens there — not the other way around. Most of what I make is made between midnight and four. The window faces a fire escape I never use. Everything important is behind me when I'm at the desk.
/// Chapter 04
Currently
Reading
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Correction
Thomas Bernhard
Шестой раз. Каждый раз это другая книга.
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The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche
Книга V. О искусстве и его границах.
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Tarkovsky's Diaries
Andrei Tarkovsky
Каждый вечер пара страниц.
Listening
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Lorn
— Ask the Dust
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Arca
— KicK ii
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Björk
— Vespertine
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Aphex Twin
— Selected Ambient Works Vol. II
Watching
- — Béla Tarr — Werckmeister Harmonies (в сотый раз)
- — Сериал Dark — пересмотр
- — Фильмы Сокурова в произвольном порядке
Last updated: April 2026 / updates every few weeks
/// Chapter 05
Sound references
If you're placing ShiShi on a map — this is the territory.
Direct influences
- — Lorn — the weight, the patience, the refusal to console
- — Arca — the body of sound, the rupture, the physical detail
- — Aphex Twin — the rigor of texture, the cold beauty of math
- — Björk — the voice as architecture, the structural courage
Sonic neighbors
- — Coil — the occult as composition
- — Burial — the melancholy as address
- — Ben Frost — the physical weight
- — Tim Hecker — the texture as subject
Unexpected kinship
- — Morton Feldman — the patience of duration
- — Scott Walker (late) — the lyric as blade
- — William Basinski — the decay as music
- — Jóhann Jóhannsson — the cinematic without cinema
/// For press
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